Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Christopher Bollas

Critical Essay by Christopher Bollas

SOURCE: "Melville's Lost Self: Bartleby," in American Imago, Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter, 1974, pp. 401-11.

In the following essay, Bollas argues that a psychological interpretation of "Bartleby" demonstrates the value of psychoanalysis to literary criticism.

Herman Melville's short novel "Bartleby" is, a tale about a "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn" young man who answers an advertisement for a position as a scrivener. He is accepted for employment, disrupts the routine of his new environment when he "prefers not to" engage in certain assigned tasks, forces the employer to feel a resourcelessness that compels him to move his office. It ends in Bartleby's pathetic death after he has been hustled off to prison.

I believe that Bartleby's arrival at the office and his subsequent breakdown into negativity is a mimetic representation of a need to find a nurturant space where he can regress toward the healing of a "basic...
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